Incident Vs Request

[saravananmk]

Hi,

What is the difference between Incident and Request where these two can be used? why we go for request instead of incident?

Thanks,

Saravanan

[Community Alums]

Hi,

Incident

Incident management (IM) is an IT service management (ITSM) process area. The first goal of the incident management process is to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.

Incident management (ITSM) - Wikipedia

Request

Read the article here

3 Reasons to Separate your Service Requests from Incident & Change

In Incident, the team tries to close the incident as soon as possible but Requests can be of different types.

[Venkat122]

Hi Sarva,

As per ITIL definitions, Incident will be created when any issue causes interruption to the service (like server down and users can't access resource and if it is down for long time then will lead to an outage and can bring business loss) and hence this needs to be resolved ASAP.

Request will be create when we need help with something (like requesting for mouse, Access to some applications etc.)

[JLeslie]

I believe the confusion comes in many time is I had a mouse and it stopped working.  Is that an incident or a request?  Password resets is another example. Many people see password resets as a request, however, it impacts one's ability to be productive, so is an incident?  

[elbow]

Sorry to drag this up - what about a data entry error?

Example: user enters incorrect end date on a particular customer record and is unable to change it back themselves due to system constraints. 

Is this an Incident - customer is unable to perform function(s) until the data is corrected

or

Service Request - to correct the mistake made by the user/staff member.